JKR poem to IW - Brilliant

I really understand where you are coming from. I was born in the mid 80s and had a continual struggle with my parents over my secondary education. My parents told me to challenge everything and to explore alternative explanations. My teachers told me to resist looking under the covers and just accept the stock answer in order to get maximum points.

My parents were right but it has been a hard road to re-teach my brain to query everything and be critical. Pick a contentious subject, any contentious subject, read the commentary from 5 respected sources (within their own community) on each side of the argument and then do the "on the one hand but then on the other" and decide which argument is best evidenced, has the least leaps of logic and is the most coherent. Then revisit your first choice over time to check that new facts haven't shifted the paradigm.

No suffers don't think their bodies don't function. That's my point. That the "wrong brain" story doesn't match the actual situation.

As to "feel better living as the opposite sex" I do sympathise and in theory that sounds like it shouldn't be a problem, right? As long as when it matters, like anything that is supposed to be women only, like sports or prisons or women's officerships or woman-only networking events, the people who are only "living as" understand they are not included, it should be fine, right?

But these are the problems with that.

Firstly, that is not how the genderist movement has framed trans people's needs. The demand has been to accept that someone wanting to "live as" the opposite sex is proof that person truly is the opposite sex in a way that is unphysical and undefinable but nevertheless more fundamental than mere body sex, and therefore such people cannot morally be excluded from any provisions or protections based on sex.

Secondly, let's say the TRA demands and Stonewall Law are rolled back to the sort of compassionate compromise you envision. What happens when our GD sufferer hits one of those hard boundaries? Now they have to say "Ah, actually I'm not, in fact, a woman. I only live as one", maybe in front of people who didn't know. That's going to be incredibly triggering for them. And of course those people should be accepting and compassionate, but there's still going to be a sense of betrayal or distrust that this friend has through lies or ommission mislead them about something so fundamental. And when I say it's fundamental, it's not the arrangement of the body itself so much as the difference in life experience and opportunities, the shared frustrations and common bonds that will have been assumed. No one likes to feel like they have been fooled. Knowing the person you thought you knew and could trust has been misrepresenting themself means knowing they held themself always a little bit back behind a character they were playing. It's setting trans people up for pain and rejection.

Thirdly, it places the friends who do know in the uncomfortable position of having to support the deception. Imagine you had a friend who wanted everyone to believe they were French. Seems harmless enough, right? But wouldn't you feel a little embarrassed knowing their French accent was put on? Knowing their memories of maman's crepes never happened? Wouldn't you feel a little uncomfortable introducing them to an actual French friend? Not because their desire to be seen as French is anything perverse or malicious but because they are nevertheless deceiving people and because they are living by stereotypes of something they have never truly experienced.

I believe the better path is to create more space in society for "feminine" (which should be renamed to remove it from female) personalities, preferences, desires and interests in men and "masculine" (same point) personalities, preferences, desires and interests in women so there is less genderised difference between the sexes for GD to arise in the first place.

And in that world, those men who still claim their GD means they need to be in women's private spaces, well their motives are pretty clear.

Do you consider the voices of the gender clinicians or independent researchers who are raising alarms to be biased?

Because we can help you with links. Most of us have read the words of those clinicians. The majority of them now talk about exploratory therapy to discover if there are causes for the dysphoria and making a person resilient about their reality.

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Blue painted roses
Are still roses too

Absolutely this. Going through puberty can be traumatic at the best of times, I fully remember loathing getting my periods and the restrictions I felt that put on me, not to mention the awkwardness and embarrassment once I realised that my group of friends, which were almost exclusively boys, started looking at, and treating me differently, and the feeling that I was no longer a girl but I certainly didn’t feel like a woman. All children should be allowed the time to literally grow up, and what they should be told is that the feeling that you don’t recognise or can’t come to terms with your changing body is completely normal and WILL pass, not to be put on a horrific medicalised pathway that is irreversible and nothing short of butchery.

@ThisFluentBiscuit In these days of distorted reality I understand where you’re coming from, but I find Dr Bell quietly impresses with his approach, not to mention his years of experience, he also doesn’t appear to me to have an axe to grind.

@LadyBracknellsHandbagg Thanks, I'll look him up. As ever with contentious topics, it's so hard to find independent, unbiased information written by someone without a particular agenda. It's frustrating because one side says one thing, the other side says a bunch of things directly contradicting it, and it feels impossible to get at the truth.

If individuals had a body that didn’t belong with their brain, that body wouldn’t function. A male body with a female brain would have wonky stuff going on, as the brain tried to send female hormones it doesn’t have to body parts it doesn’t have. In fact it works in a very typical healthy way. Until they mess with it.

Thank you FlirtsWithRhinos. If - if - gender dysphoria exists as an identifiable condition, I grew up with it.

I can give what you've written here my Seal of Approval- that's what it was like all right.
this is not about something inside and innate in the body expressing itself but a reaction within the mind to what is perceived outside the body and to the meanings the mind projects onto that perception.

As I've said elsewhere, I would have bitten the doctors' arms off if I'd been offered puberty blockers, hormone treatment - not sure about surgery, but only because of squeamishness.

When I read posts from mothers whose daughters have been offered, and have taken the transition route - and I have been moved to tears on occasions by their distress at seeing what their daughters are doing to their bodies - I thank my lucky stars that my body was not messed up to coincide with my confused mind, and time and pragmatism brought body and mind into a peaceful coexistence as an adult human lesbian female.
I wish all 'gender-dysphoric' children had the same space and freedom to come to terms with biological reality, while rejecting the social stereotyping which is at the heart of their problem.

@ThisFluentBiscuit You could benefit from reading articles and interviews with Dr David Bell, a well respected psychiatrist and Tavistock clinic whistleblower. GD in children/young people usually has its roots in abuse or deep rooted homophobia, and if correctly diagnosed and treated resolves after puberty in the vast majority of young people. Most of those young people turn out to be gay or lesbian.

@FlirtsWithRhinos

Yes, I also meant that gender dysphoria is a psychological condition.

Also, you said: "....it's a psychological condition whereby a person in a highly sex-differentiated society takes their projections about the opposite sex as a subconscious metaphor for elements of their own character they believe are not compatible with their body sex (which is meaningless if you think about it - the fact that they are that sex and they do have that character is literal proof that character is not incompatible with their sex), because if it was an actual incompatibility, the person would not be able to function physically."

I don't think that sufferers of GD think their bodies can't function physically - they don't usually have physically illnesses from GD . When they say their mind/brain isn't compatible with their body's sex, I take that to mean that they don't feel their insides and outsides are a psychological or social match. Even if it was possible for there to be ladybrains and for them to develop as such inside a male body (which seems that's not the case), it would still be a social/psychological effect, rather than producing any physical illness.

It seems to me that people with GD suffer enormously, psychologically. It must be very psychologically uncomfortable to be one sex physically but strongly feel that you are the opposite one. Maybe trans women they feel the best way to relieve that suffering is to live as if they are women, as far as possible. I'm not saying that's right, I'm saying that may be why.

What Flirts said.

The narrative around anorexia, another body dysphoria (partly replaced by transgenderism in some of the schools where it used to be the dominant social contagion among adolescent girls) used to be that they would look at their skeletal bodies and see fat. But I have no idea how true that is.

I do know how manipulative and controlling some people with anorexia were.

My point is that this "gender dysphoria" is not some sort of actual physical difference in the brain due to hormone washes or estrogenic compounds in water or mum watching too many ballets or whatever story the genderists seize on next after the current one is disproved, it's a psychological condition whereby a person in a highly sex-differentiated society takes their projections about the opposite sex as a subconscious metaphor for elements of their own character they believe are not compatible with their body sex (which is meaningless if you think about it - the fact that they are that sex and they do have that character is literal proof that character is not incompatible with their sex), because if it was an actual incompatibility, the person would not be able to function physically.

The fact that the dysphoria locates itself in the externally visible and to a great degree socially significant feature of the opposite sex as opposed to the inner workings of, for example, the kidneys is further proof that this is not about something inside and innate in the body expressing itself but a reaction within the mind to what is perceived outside the body and to the meanings the mind projects onto that perception.

And once you realise this is not something like a physical disability which we support by doing what we can to replace the missing capability, but rather a projection of disordered ideas about what men and women are allowed to be, you realise there is no moral or logical basis to the TRA demand that these people be accomodated as if they actually are the opposite sex.

Trans people may be entirely sincere in what they believe about themselves but they are not in reality the opposite sex, they have no greater insight than anyone else what is like to be the opposite sex, and it reduces and insults all of us to pretend they are somehow closer to the opposite sex than others of their actual sex.

@FlirtsWithRhinos The genderist belief that a brain could somehow be "meant" for a different body, somehow "know" it's supposed to be in a different body to the degree it expects to look down and see boobs or whatever, yet still be capable of handling its actual body including all the sex-specific parts of that body makes no sense at all.

Well, I guess that's what gender dysphoria is.

Ladybrains are pink
Manbrains are blue
Genderists think that's progressive
I think it's bloody sexist, don't you?

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Sex is bloody obvious for 99.9999% of the human population and that has physical and social consequences that are nothing to do with a putative inner mental gender
So don't pretend that sex has no impact on the many just to pander to the preferences of the few.

He didn’t throw under any buses, but did rather lean into the little woman that needs help with difficult things trope- albeit from a wife rather than a husband.

A right.
Thats just an advantage of having a partner, and tbf I would expect him to have how was your day and can I help conversations with her.
Different if it was a cover your arse as he threw her under the bus.

Thanks for the update🌻

I can’t remember precisely- it was along the lines of NC saying, ‘Ddid you do x?’, and DU replying, ’I thinks so, or it may have been my wife, I’m not very good at tech things so she helps me sometimes.’. 🤢

I would also recommend Delusions of Gender for a critical look at various studies. It's illuminating on this subject, but also really gets you thinking about possible biases in research in general.

Sorry a bit off topic

Was that the reason given for his personal email use or was it said that she his wife has emails not given into evidence?

(I am not fully reading the full "main" thread as I cant afford the swear tax)

Roses are red
Violets are blue
Men have Y chromosomes
That includes you

I think if a whole bunch of people who are unequivocally female bodied on this thread can't agree on a common experience of a "female brain", there can be very little credibility for a man thinking he is experiencing a "female brain".

It's telling that there are no people out there insisting they were "born the wrong height" or "born with the wrong size hands". Indeed, at various stages in the womb the foetus has no legs, no lungs etc, and yet no one is claiming they have a brain that got stuck without legs. It's only the sex divide when the body seems to have this side effect of sometimes generating the wrong brain, and the sex divide just so happens to be one of the most socially and psychologically significant in our society, the one on which culture (mostly patriarchal) has layered a whole load of bullshit about how men and women differ in ways beyond the body, mostly to do with men's fascination with women's role in childbirth and sex and their retro-fitting stories to make sense of something they don't actually know about, and one in which the divide still has significant impacts in how we live and are seen socially.

The brain grows out of the body. The mind is just the consciousness of the body. They are not two separate things, they are parts of one thing. Even if there are certain physiological factors more common in one sex than the other, finding them in members of the opposite sex doesn't mean "Oh that's a female brain in a man's body", it means some men also have those factors and therefore those factors are not exclusively female. Finding them in a man just means you found them in a man. It in no way means that man is somehow a little closer to being a woman than other men.

If you think all squares are red and all triangles are blue then one day you find a red triangle, the logical response is "oh some triangles are red" not "oh all this time we've been wrong thinking a square is a shape with with four equal sides, some squares look like triangles but are actually squares"

The genderist belief that a brain could somehow be "meant" for a different body, somehow "know" it's supposed to be in a different body to the degree it expects to look down and see boobs or whatever, yet still be capable of handling its actual body including all the sex-specific parts of that body makes no sense at all.

All that phrase can ever mean is "I think my personality is more like what I think the opposite sex is like than what I think my own sex is like" and that is nothing more than one person's projected sexism.

This is from your link:
All these measured differences are averages derived from pooling widely varying individual results. While statistically significant, the differences tend not to be gigantic. They are most noticeable at the extremes of a bell curve, rather than in the middle, where most people cluster. Some argue that we may safely ignore them.

The differences are tiny.

This report was linked from the other article:
Breaking down stereotypes: gender and achievement in schools

This report is more relevant than stuff about monkeys playing with toys. It shows that the difference between girls' and boys' attainment in English, maths and science is smaller than that between different ethnic groups and between children from different home backgrounds.

At all levels up to GCSE, there is very little difference between boys' and girls' attainment in maths and science.

Interestingly, although more boys than girls study physics and maths at A level, a higher proportion of girls get a grade A. This is probably because in general, only the most able girls in those subjects go on to study to A level. The situation is reversed in MFL, with fewer boys studying languages, but a higher proportion of those who do getting the higher grades.

It looks like quite an interesting report if you're interested in sex differences in education, although it's quite old (2007).